The Sort Artist tag

[karbulot]

Hi, I only recently migrated from MusicBee 3.0 to MusicBee 3.3 (because of Last.fm scrobbling issues) and ran into the following problem: The sort artist tag doesn't work the way it used to. I have two main use cases for this tag: Collaborations and Various Artists albums. With collaborations, I used to put, for example, "David Byrne; Brian Eno" under the Sort Artist field, and the album displayed both under David Byrne and Brian Eno. Now, on 3.3, it appears under neither when I sort by sort artist in the main window. I found a workaround for this -  I can put multiple values in the Artist field, and it works fine. However, this breaks my other use for the tag, the Various Artists albums, tracks on these are split up by their respective artists. Again, sorting by Album Artist solves this issue, but introduces a new one - there's sometimes an artist that has performed under various names (for example, Foetus - he's performed as You've Got Foetus On Your Breath and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel). I liked to put these alternate names in the Album Artist tag, thought it fit there nicely - until this. The Sort Artist tag also behaves weirdly if I have tracks by the same artist under different Sort Artists, which happens often with artists I have on Various Artists albums.
Is there a way to return to the way I used this tag on MusicBee 3.0? Or should I just retag everything to use the Album Artist tag? I'd rather not...

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

I use <Sort Artist> the way you do and it works as expected in v3.4 and was working as I wished in v3.3.

[MTVhike]

As a simpleton, I still learning the basics of MB. I'm trying to understand the issue of this post by looking at the Wiki entry for sorting. If I understand it correctly, if sorting the following tags doesn't work right: Artist, Album Artist, Album, Title, and Composer and you don't want to change the tag, you can use another tag with the word "sort" plus the regular tag name and MB will sort by that tag. Is that right? And, why would the regular tag be wrong in some cases?

[psychoadept]

As a simpleton, I still learning the basics of MB. I'm trying to understand the issue of this post by looking at the Wiki entry for sorting. If I understand it correctly, if sorting the following tags doesn't work right: Artist, Album Artist, Album, Title, and Composer and you don't want to change the tag, you can use another tag with the word "sort" plus the regular tag name and MB will sort by that tag. Is that right? And, why would the regular tag be wrong in some cases?

The sort tags are specific tags which are shown on the Sorting tab in the tag editor. However, MusicBee has some special handling if you turn on custom sorting, which is more like what you're describing. Without that, MusicBee will still sort the base tags by their literal values (The Beatles would be sorted under T, not B, and so on).

By default, with custom sorting MusicBee will ignore The, and you can configure other words/characters to ignore automatically under Sorting/Grouping preferences. Any tags you want sorted a specific way, you can enter on the Sorting tab. For instance, I have "? and The Mysterians" sorted as "Question Mark and The Mysterians". Custom sorting will automatically apply what you enter to all instances of that value in your library.

[MTVhike]

Under Sort Tags, the wiki says:
"Sort Artist, Sort Album, Sort Title, and Sort Composer work as follows:

if there is a value in the custom tag, then that is used
otherwise it applies the $Sort function to the standard tag, if it exists"

Which I interpret to mean that if nothing is entered in the custom tag, then the base tag is used, otherwise the custom tag is used.

[psychoadept]

Under Sort Tags, the wiki says:
"Sort Artist, Sort Album, Sort Title, and Sort Composer work as follows:

if there is a value in the custom tag, then that is used
otherwise it applies the $Sort function to the standard tag, if it exists"

Which I interpret to mean that if nothing is entered in the custom tag, then the base tag is used, otherwise the custom tag is used.

Keep in mind that was written before the whole custom sorting feature was created. What it means is if you use the SORT tag, those rules are applied in order to create the value of the sort tag. It doesn't change the sorting of the base tag. $Sort uses the same ignore words list that I mentioned before, so it would still change "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The", if nothing was entered for Sort Artist or Sort Album Artist.